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Romance Sex Love and Marriage (INT 325)

About This Course

This course will enable students to examine various perspectives on romance, sex, love, and marriage. The course will begin with an introductory session followed immediately by three weeks of an exploration of romance. Thereafter, the remaining themes will be examined for specific amounts of time, though all of the themes overlap quite a bit and are constantly under the microscope.

Topics and Approach

Throughout the semester we will watch, at the very least, a film clip that provides a representation chosen to accentuate the readings, discuss the film in the context of the assigned reading(s) for that week, and write a paper articulating the film connection to the philosophical concepts under examination. In the process of accomplishing this research, the students will acquire knowledge about romance, sex, love, and marriage as framed through a philosophical lens. This will assist them in assessing the subject matter from a plethora of perspectives while examining the underpinnings and assumptions that often impede or prevent a rational perspective from evolving. Lastly, students will have individual and group projects where they will have to own the subject matter and present that ownership to the class with a final presentation and oral examination.

This course satisfies the curriculum inclusion requirements for General Education regarding multi-cultural awareness by exploring differences in the discourse, the influence the discourse has on identity formation, cultural norms, gender, xenophobia, class, sexual orientation and traditional disenfranchisement of the so-called “other” while examining and explicating various ethnic and cultural stereotypes and problematic assumptions.

Questions, Comments, Suggestions

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